“A stone and a cloud in the same place.”

Dawn said, “What?”

Farisa lifted her head. “Nothing. I must have been mumbling in my ...” Sleep?

The madhouse lights had come on. Men on the upper level were singing the Global Company’s anthem, “Work Makes Us Great.”

Dawn sat down beside Farisa, who was rubbing the back of her neck.

Farisa looked at her slippered feet before saying, “Can I ask you something?”

Dawn laughed. “You already have.”

“You’re not dumb, and by the standard of this place, you’re lucid.”

“I was lucid once. I am a madwoman but, worse in this world, old.”

“You could walk right out, though. I am sure you could have left this place thirty years ago.”

“I could have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Dawn’s accent changed; her tone turned flat. “The Global Company won. When I was young, I got so angry every day about the poverty, the injustice, the pure senselessness of its world. I live here now, and I’m less angry. People still take from others, but there is so much less to take.”

Farisa sighed. “I understand.”

“You think I’m a coward.”

“I wouldn’t use that word. It’s too negative. Had my parents been... less courageous... I might still have parents.”

“Could be.” Dawn walked over to a wall and reached behind a steam pipe that was probably no longer connected to anything, bringing out a brown paper bag. “I got something for us—at the time, for me, but I’ll share. Jorked ‘em off a guard.”

“You stole it?”

“The world steals. It is easier to live with it if you live in it.”

Farisa laughed. “It’s not a moral objection. I just... wouldn’t.”

I suppose, though, what I intend to do is just as dangerous.

Dawn’s gnarled hands struggled with a string that had been tied around the bag. Farisa, though she had only one hand free, offered to help untie the twine.

“I’ve got it.” Dawn tugged a string and the knot disappeared.

Inside the bag was a cluster of purple grapes. The old woman laid a few on the metal plate in front of Farisa. “I’m guessing you haven’t had these in a while.”

“No, I haven’t.” Farisa bit into one and let the juice trickle down her tongue. “Thank you, Dawn.”

They spoke, as they ate, about their childhoods. This time, Farisa believed Dawn’s recollections might be her true story, because the sweetness of the fruit had softened their minds enough to allow unclouded recollections, so it felt like they were having the sort of conversations free people had. At some point, Dawn got up and left, and Farisa fell into a doze, because muscles that had been tense forever had achieved some measure of relief.

Her sense of relaxation was short-lived, however. She woke up to an aching stomach and purple skin beneath her fingernails. A chalk circle had been drawn around her. The chills and fever—it would not be unlike the Company to play sadistic games with the temperature, but she began to suspect these issues were matters of illness rather than the environment—were worsening, too, so she suspected madhouse fever. No one got well in a place like this; death by illness left the Company thankful for the freeing of space, not only in this institution but in the world.

No one was coming who would free her. What had the Marquessa’s riddle been? A stone and a cloud in the same place. How? How could two things so opposite fill the same space? Had this all been a product of her fevered mind, a contradiction made within itself to pass time? Time was running out; it could not be so abused. Yet she felt sure there would be no way out unless she solved this riddle.

A stone and a cloud. A stone, and a cloud. A stone—and a cloud!—in the same place. How?

#

She had been staring into gray space for one minute or twenty thousand. The light was as harsh as it had ever been. Sometimes a guard would walk backward and speak in reversed sentences to disrupt an inmate’s sense of time, and she had always found this taunt childish, since true reversal of a sound would require not only reversal of the words’ positions but that of the words themselves, rendering them unintelligible. Now, though, she found it distressing. The affected backward walk made sense in a way that was unsettling.

A cloud and a stone, not a stone and a cloud? It might have been May 5; would May 6, or May 4, follow? Could it still be called spring, if light and temperature did not vary, except as one’s own experienced illness fluctuated? Did the sun still rise in the east, set in the west? Why did it seem—it was April ‘94, or was it still March?—that Farisa was aging in reverse, from twenty to nineteen to eighteen to sixteen to twelve? If she were to escape, would her thin cotton gown protect her against the chilly February air? Had the last red leaves fallen? Had they flown up to their trees and turned green? Time had broken itself. It seemed possible that she would neither escape nor die tomorrow but be stuck in this place forever, her mind having hit a switch in the tracks, having followed rails that curved away from time. Zda noro m’kha—principle of absurdity, principle of explosion; from a false premise, anything follows. What was more false than this?

Her paper slippers had come off—she must have fallen asleep—and were out of reach. She wanted to believe it meant nothing here, thousands of miles from Loran, where people did not think about feet much at all, and where no rules of dignity, local or distant, applied at all. Still, that feeling of madhouse air—cold, prickly, nauseating—on her soles was agonizing, and could not be allayed by sitting cross-legged, feet out of view, because this place had eyes everywhere—was an eye, or was dozens of them, a peering iris in every ripple of air. She’d lost so much flesh, especially in her legs, that sitting in any position hurt. Concrete against her tailbone could send bolts of pain up into her armpits and, in her current state, the feeling would linger for hours, because there was no comfortable stance or seating here. She grabbed one of her shoes, reachable after a long stretch, but the other remained out of reach.

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

She could have asked anyone for help, but there would be no help from anyone during her necessary escape, so she decided she would figure this out on her own. To damage or remove her wrist cuff would draw notice, and this was not the right time for that. So she would have to go into the blue. She found the space murky and lightless, nearly impenetrable, as it had been since her arrival here. The small paper slipper resisted her movement. It would not budge.

She made fists and would have screamed, but she did not want to draw attention to herself, so she bit her top lip. One did not emote here. Her lip broke and she tasted iron. She swallowed her own blood.

A stone and a cloud, a cloud and a stone.

A stone and a cloud could hold the same position on a map—she pictured rain falling on a granite mountain—but this was an artifact of projection; they were not really in the same place. They could connect—intimately, in the form of lightning—but every point in the world had allegiance to one or the other, to cloud or mountain. That was the nature of occupation—for all places called “here” somewhere, there could be solid stone or there could be vapor or there could be neither, but never both. This had all been a nonsensical riddle, a waste of time, one more of the Marquessa’s tricks.

Her wrists and arms hurt. Her forearm was swelling and the cuff was digging in. Madhouse fever made every joint ache and her skin hurt from contact with anything, air least offensive except on the soles, because she still had only one shoe on. To think of another lead-colored Company man seeing her in this state emerged her; she tasted the copper aura of her own fury in her mouth, and she realized the passion of her hatred for this place—the iron bars of the upper-floor cages; the ugly steel benches that were probably still more comfortable than her spot on the concrete floor; the slightly rusted chain and the cuff restraining her; those thick brass rings the Globbo wardens wore—and felt as if something were about to burn but, here, little could. There were no books, there were no flowers, there was no wooden furniture in this prison of concrete and steel.

Steel, steel, steel. Iron with carbon—not too much, but some. Copper comes from malachite; iron, from hematite. The water here tastes of rust; it’s disgusting. The guards, some of them smoke. There’s lead in pipe smoke. A cloud? Is that a cloud? Is this prison a stone? Katarin said... Katarin said... “There’s a new shipment of books from Salinay.” And the theorist say... and the theorists say... and the theorists say... I don’t belong here. I disbelong, that’s my new word. I disbelong like a cloud inside a stone. I evaporate here; I am evaporating. The theorists from Salinay say... they say... metal’s properties—swift conductance of heat, reflectivity of light, transmission of electric current—derive from... a crystal—like stone!—of positive charge while a negative fluid—a cloud—moves through. Metal. Metal what, Marquessa? It’s everywhere. The bars, these cuffs, the rings on the guards’ fingers. What is your point?

Farisa asked aloud, “What the fuck are you trying to tell me?” No one responded.

A tiny hexagonal bolt had fallen off a wall panel, farther away than the paper slipper—there was no way to reach it by hand—but Farisa found, in the blue, that she could exert some force upon it. The tiny bolt stood up, rolled across the floor, fell into the paper shoe, and was dragged toward Farisa, bringing the slipper into reach.

“I solved it,” Farisa said. “What now?”

No answer came. She could, she learned, still work with metal. She had not one-tenth the power she’d had before, but she could warm her wrist cuff up to the point where it fell warm. Two attempts later, she stung and darkened her skin. This was progress, but of what use? She rested; when she returned to ability, she could do it again. The cuff felt hotter, and the pain was an added challenge—could she sustain herself in the blue, despite it? Exhaustion came after practice; she let sleep take her. Skill and stamina seemed to improve. She put focus on a link of her chain—the heat was exceeding what her skin could bear—and got it hot enough to glow a dull red. All restraints could be broken, given enough time.

But how much do I have?

#

A guard whistled as he walked by. “Six-point-two, we’re watching you; six-point-four, through the white door.”

Madhouse fever had swept in like nightfall. Sickness proved violent, but not clamorous, as a place that had once been loud during all hours now seemed quiet. Even the screamers knew to avoid attention. The orderlies checked every patient’s temperature every three hours or so. New chalk circles had been drawn around people whose bodies had fallen into a dreary state of uncertain wakefulness.

Six-point-four, through the white door. What medicine did the doctor give behind this white door, and why did he wait until the fever was so high to administer it?

Two orderlies approached. One put a glass thermometer, warm and wet from prior use, in Farisa’s mouth.

The other said, “What’s this one?”

“Topping out right now at six-two.”

“I’m seeing six-three.”

“Are you blind? It’s closer to six-two.”

“No, idiot. Look at it straight on. You’re holding it wrong. Six-point-three, fair as tits.”

A supervisor stormed over. “What’s the matter with you two?”

“Nothing,” said one of the men. “Let’s just call it—”

“Six-three,” said the supervisor. “It’s clear as day.”

“See you in three hours,” said the first orderly with a chuckle. “Better not get sicker. You’re at the edge of the plank.”

“Madhouse fever was more fun in the old days,” the other said. “You could put thermometers anywhere.”

They were all gone now. She hadn’t seen them leave. They had just been here, and now were not. What had been meant by “the edge of the plank?” She had been sure to do nothing to upset these men, so why had there been this odd threat?

Farisa would have her answer soon. She noticed a woman, carried by two men to a place where the colorless concrete wall blended so perfectly with its white door that she had never noticed it before. As it opened, the smell of ash poured out, and she realized that this “white door” was not a doctor’s attention and not medicine, but escape of the kind her mother had found. Six-point-four, the white door. Her fever had hit 6.3; the thermal energy between her current state and execution—she had weighed a hundred and eighteen pounds, but she had surely lost weight in this place—was less than the nutritional content of an apple. There were spells for fire and heat; none existed for cold, and this stale air could not be made to dissipate unwanted heat, and she had sweated herself dry some hours ago. She could push herself no more. Exertions in the blue risked heating her up.

She was not altogether scared, though—that was the mercy of this ailment. The exhaustion made fear not impossible, but unbecoming, like a nude man at a king’s funeral, an absurd spectacle that could be ignored, for no one else would know what to do either. She could doze off into a fever dream now at will. She could choose not to be here. She found herself in a village where children, all wearing amethyst earrings, were singing that age-old playground rhyme:

We dance for rain; around we go,

the youngest fey by the nightshade mead,

till one falls down in the blackrue bush—

that’s one less mouth in the house to feed.

It would never rain in this place, though.

#

“You look terrible,” said the dark-skinned man.

Farisa had first seen him playing cards; Dawn had identified him as ex-Reverie. He had struck her as aloof at first, but seemed accessible—even kind—as he sat next to Farisa.

“I’m sure I do,” said Farisa. “It’s probably best if you stay away from me.”

“I’ve had madhouse fever, so I won’t get it again.”

“You survived it?”

“Some do.”

“Not in places like this, though.”

“I loitered outside death’s door, but the place didn’t want me. I woke up one morning and found that it had abated.

Farisa felt a wave of nausea cresting. “I spent three days on a Polar Ocean trawler. This is worse.”

“Would a cigarette help?”

“Certainly not.” She noticed the skin on her wrists had thinned. She had almost never seen her own veins, given her dark skin, but right now they were protruding.

“It often does not, other than to break up time.”

A dull ache circled her ribs like a vest. She grabbed her tin bucket and retched into it, producing only bile. “I’m really sick. I need the doctor.”

The man looked down. “You won’t see him if you look like that.”

“I still do not understand that. Isn’t the treatment of sick people his job?”

“One would think, but here it is not the case.”

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“I need to see him.” This place ran on superior orders. Escape by other means, with her worsening physical state, would be nearly impossible, but if she could convince a physician that she ought not to be here, she would have a chance. “If he doesn’t see the sick, what does he treat?”

“Injuries, mostly. Fights, falls, that sort of thing. You’ll never see him if there’s a chalk circle around you.”

“Right.” Farisa crossed her arms and looked down. When she looked up, the man had gone elsewhere. She was sick; she needed, against all odds, to get well. Then, she would need an injury. That, too, would require effort, because self-injury would prove this place right about her, but there were few other options while shackled to a pillar.

When the two men arrived again with their mercury thermometer, she felt worse than the last time. She would need a favorable reading, but doubted her state would produce one. Cooling the liquid metal inside the thermometer was no option—no such spells existed—and compressing it to the degree necessary for a false result would be impossible too. The best she could do was press her mind against the mercury’s meniscus, causing the glass tube itself to tilt, and she was achieving so little she was on the cusp of losing hope when...

The first man said, “Five-nine. Her fever’s going down.”

“That’s a clear six,” said the other.

“Must you always be contrary, fish clit?”

“She’s six-point-oh. She might even be six-one.”

“I see you have a tendency to round things up.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think you know.”

The man sighed. “I put fifty grot on this one winning the race, and now she might not even finish.”

“It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes...”

The orderlies walked away. They returned in three hours, and in three hours more, and she repeated the feat, as much as it exhausted her, for she had little else to do. Although she remained quite ill, consecutive favorable readings of her vital signs led to the chalk circle being erased.

She was now, by this place’s logic, not-sick, but treatment by the doctor would require that she need medical attention, so she would have to get herself injured. She had no sense of the outer world’s time, but on the madhouse rhythm it was early afternoon, the time when fights tended to break out. The two largest men nearest to her did everything together, and she did not want to suffer an attack from them, because she might suffer severe injury or worse before the scuffle could be broken up. If she chose a woman to provoke, there was a high chance of the Globbo orderlies finding the spectacle entertaining and, rather than end it, preventing anyone from doing so. She also did not want the perception that she had started the fight, so the people known to be well-behaved were not options. The best person to take a punch from, she decided, would be a short pudgy man known for his bad temper, disliked enough that someone would quickly step in to stop his blows. She whistled in his direction.

“Yeah, you!” Farisa yelled. “Hit me!”

The man shook his head and walked away.

“Look at me, you fat piece of shit.” She stood, cuff grating as it slid along the iron pillar. She hated doing this, because she had nothing against the man, but saw no faster route to the doctor and her own escape, so she let the insults flow as if they had been meant for someone she truly disliked. “Your mother’s a cunt-throated whore. I bet the bitch has five extra holes just to take all that Globbo cock.”

The man turned around and silently walked toward her. Farisa swallowed. Although shorter than most men, he was still four inches taller and about fifty pounds heavier than she was.

“What, you’re gonna hit a girl? I dare you to do it. I bet you’re a coward just like your father, who’s probably taken even more cock than your m—”

A flash of light blinded Farisa. Balance failed. A second blow connected with the side of her head, and tendrils of sparkly heat—it was not pain, but would become such once her senses fully returned—spread through her body until she lost awareness. When she returned to mind and sight, someone she had never seen was holding her up by the shoulders, asking questions. She fought a sense of being underwater; she could hear words but not decipher them, let alone answer.

“Get the doctor,” he said in a slow voice that seemed to come from miles away.

#

Blurry shapes moved above Farisa. This headache was worse than she’d ever had, flashing like an electric arc with every heartbeat. Two men, who had hooked their arms under her armpits, were slowly walking her forward, and her cuffs had been taken off, though she was unsure at first if she would be able to walk without support.

“Doctor’s running late,” said a male voice.

“What happened to her?” said another.

“Our favorite moron did what he does best.”

“Can you hurry up?”

“She’s goddamn heavy.”

“Bodies are heavy, fuck-whistle.”

The concrete floor was cold. To her horror, her slippers had come off and she was barefoot. The men took her to a staircase and climbed it with her; at the top of another, she caught a glint of impossibly blue light.

They took her into a room and one of the men set her down on a metal chair. “Wait here.”

She clamped her feet on the floor.

Through a window, the sky hurt to look at. She stifled tears of confused emotion; she realized that so much of her mind had written off seeing the outside world again. The bare concrete yard with tufts of onion grass erupting through ground cracks, to her impoverished eye, beautiful. A bookshelf sat heavy with medical texts she was tempted to read solely to have words in her mind that weren’t her own. Glass animals of all kinds, from a pill-sized ladybug to an elephant as tall as a book, had been set in order from smallest to largest. The only artifact suggesting this could not be a Cait Forest professor’s office was the bloody bed, suggesting a birth had occurred here.

The doctor, a thin man with a delicate face who wore a brown overcoat, came in. “Are you Beatrice?”

“I am. Nicole Beatrixa, but my friends call me… that.” Farisa extended a hand.

“I don’t shake hands. It’s nothing personal, but understand that I touch a lot of…“

Farisa nodded and smiled. She had not heard a man speak in such a calm, civilized voice for a long time; she had nearly forgotten that speech was possible at middling volume, because things said in the world below were either screamed or whispered.

“Ignore the birthing bed,” he said. “Someone really should have cleaned that up, but it doesn’t matter. We won’t be using it.”

A muscular man cuffed Farisa’s wrists together.

“It’s only procedure.” The doctor slipped a glass rod into her gown and tucked it under her armpit. “So, how have you been feeling?”

“I’ve been…” What could she say? Was this one of their traps? To describe herself as unwell would suggest that she belonged in a hospital like this. On the other hand, a person who could spend several days in a Globbo madhouse and remain well was clearly deranged. An inconclusive answer would suit her best. “I’m alive. I hope to get out soon. It’s a waste of Company money.”

“Temperature’s six-point-one. Not ideal, not terrible.”

Farisa walked over to the bed and hid her feet under it. “Lorani.”

“That’s fine. I’ll have them bring you a pair of shoes. Real shoes.” The doctor scribbled on his clipboard, then looked at her. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

Farisa nodded. “Please do.”

“When you came in, you claimed to be some kind of teacher in Cait Forest.”

“They drugged me, so I don’t remember what I said, but I’m not. I’ve never been to Cait Forest.”

“We checked, of course. There are no records of a Beatrice—you also gave the name Beatrixa, and we checked that too, along with your Nicole—in Cait Forest.”

“As I said, I don’t know anything about Cait Forest.”

“You don’t look Cait Forest.”

She smiled, pretending to ignore the insult. “That’s good.”

“The problem is....” Using a book to back his papers, he scribbled loudly. “The drug we give you at intake is a truth serum. That doesn’t mean what you will say will be correct. Patients say all sorts of things about their former lives that don’t check out, because they believe them to be true.”

“If I said I was Cait Forest, I was—reacting badly to the medication. Maybe I did believe it then. I don’t remember. This is as close as I have ever been to that place.”

He read from a metal clipboard. “April 28, patient calls herself…”

“Nicole Beatrixa.”

“Right. Claims to have fought a forty-eyed quote, unquote monster. That’s one hell of a story, isn’t it? I suppose that’s why you’re here. Says she narrowly outran a forest fire—you knew about the forest fire before any news of it was released—and attributes it to a Far-ee-sah. Now there’s a name I’ve heard too often of late. Claims to have run here in three hours. Three hours, to cover a hundred and twelve miles? Even if you had hopped a train, which would be a Level 6 offense I would have to report, it is impossible that you came here at the speed of thirty-seven miles an hour.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re plonkered, Beatrice, but don’t worry, this is a safe place for you.”

“I’m not sure what you want from me.”

The doctor looked her over. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. You have nothing worse than a black eye, so I’ll write up some painkillers for you and make sure the orderlies deliver them on time.”

“No,” she said, “I’m never going back there.”

“It’s the safest place for you, Nicole.”

Farisa would take any risk of any kind before she would squander this chance of escape. So, in spite of fatigue, she entered the blue, put herself in the doctor’s mind as fast as she could, and set in motion a single thought, a looping ligature that would ring in place: This woman is sane and doesn’t belong here; she never did.

She left the blue—or the blue left her; at such levels of fatigue, it was hard to be sure. Exhaustion perfused her chest. Still, the spell had worked, because Dr. Bugg smiled as if he had learned something new.

“You’re not a madwoman at all.”

“With no disrespect to your position, I could have told you that.”

“You don’t belong here.”

“I agree.”

“It happens.” The doctor frowned. “We get it wrong sometimes. Not often, but even we make mistakes.”

“So... I’m free to go, right?”

The doctor looked over his notes and crossed out a section.

“Shall I walk myself out?”

Dr. Bugg turned to face the two orderlies guarding the door. “Tie the girl down.”

Before she could say anything, one of the men grabbed her arm. She stomped on his boot, to no effect. As the other approached her, she elbowed him in the side. She kicked and struggled and slammed her knee into a man with force that felt like it ought to achieve something, but they showed no signs of surprise or pain as they forced her onto the bed, making sure to lift her gown so the bloody wetness pressed into her legs, butt, and back, then tied her limbs.

“Leave and shut the door,” the doctor told the orderlies. “Even you sick fucks don’t want to see what I’m about to do.”

Farisa, despite knowing it to be useless in this place, screamed for help.

“Why would a sane woman get herself committed?” Dr. Bugg said.

“I never wanted to be here.”

“Journalist, right? Get in, get a story, tell the world about all the bad things the Global Company does to people who were, in truth, broken long before they got here. That’s it, isn’t it? The lot of you are no better than hedge spies.”

“You have the wrong idea,” Farisa said. “I’ll explain it all if you untie me. If you let me go, I will never speak of this place to anybody.”

The doctor laughed. “You pretty little idiot. You knew the name Farisa hours before we released it, so you have to have heard something, somewhere, but you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

She struggled, but she realized she would dislocate a limb before she could escape by her own force.

“I’m guessing you work for one of those dirtbag penny papers, right? You thought you’d get some Reverie psychopath to feed you a hash of shit that you could print hard-quoted and call it news?”

“No.” Farisa slowed her breathing. “I’m not a spy, not a journalist, not anything.”

The doctor spoke slowly, lowering his tone to put increasing emphasis on each word. “Nicole Beatrixa does not exist.”

“That’s because my real name is... is... it’s Katarin Pelecza. My boyfriend left me, so I got drunk, more drunk than I had the right to be, and then, th-the next morning, I was in this place and... just let me out. This will never happen again, none of it. I won’t even drink again. I’m so sorry I wasted your time. Let me out of here, and you’ll never see me again.”

Dr. Bugg, holding a set of pliers, walked toward her.

Farisa’s jaw clamped shut. She remembered Dawn’s warning: “A collector.”

“Keep still,” he said.

The image came into mind of her teeth in a drawer in this man’s house; she pictured herself with a bare-gummed mouth. She was in the blue before she had willed herself there; Dr. Bugg’s pliers glowed red, then yellow, then blinding white, causing the skin on his hand to char. He screamed.

“You’re a mage,” he said. Molten steel sizzled on his boots, and the room smelled of burning leather.

“Damned as the moon, shithead.”

“Be careful, little girl.”

“You’ll never see me again if you let me out, but if you keep me here...”

The doctor put a thumb between her lips. “You’ll what?”

“I’ll boil the eyes out of your skull.”

“I don’t think so.” He pressed her front tooth. “You’re spent. I know the signs. Five or six of you come through here every year. You think you’re the first one to try something like that?”

Her insides rolled and pressed against each other. She had little of herself to put into the blue, but she had no options, because she had been bound too tight to move. She slithered through the muck of his mind, feeling his joints move as he reached for a second pair of pliers, feeling the tool in his hand as if it were hers, and she realized she had come not only into present experience but the man’s memory, for he had done this dozens of times—bloodied faces, tongues sliced open, strange odors of fire and saliva and something like chalk—and the horror ripped her from the blue, causing her to convulse from throat to rear as a sense of total ruin spread through her body.

Some minds were so perverse, they could not be safely entered.

The doctor, though he had stepped back, remained on his feet. “You don’t give up, Beatrice, do you? It’s over.”

Her eyelids grew heavy. Her spell had failed; worse, the cavalcade of a thousand disgusting memories, the man’s fantasies mixed with real violations that had occurred in this room, had sickened her to the point of total bodily protest.

He takes too much pleasure in his crimes to be reasoned out of them. One by one, he’ll take my teeth out. He’ll slice my tongue down the middle, because that’s his routine. The passion takes over after that, and anything can happen. Anything.

“The first time you...” Farisa said.

A gray tabby cat, the one she had fed an eternity ago, entered the room.

Dr. Bugg grabbed a wooden mallet and massaged the head of it. “This’ll do nicely.”

“The first time you caused harm like this, you cried.”

Dr. Bugg slipped two fingers between Farisa’s lips and pressed on her upper gums.

“You cried because it told you things about yourself you never wanted to know. She was your older sister, you sick fuck. To this day, you don’t remember what she did or said that upset you, but you remember how you reacted. You did love her, in more than a brotherly way, so in a moment when you wanted to hurt her more than anything else, you took her by force in a way you told yourself didn’t count. You expected not to like it, but then she threw up, and her insides clamped down so hard you thought you would die, and it gave you a feeling you’ve been craving ever since, you disgusting piece of garbage. This whole bit about mouths—the teeth, the screaming, all the blood—came later, but your original pink fairy was puke, the sound and the smell. You’ve told nobody, of course, because even madmen and killers consider those like you repugnant. The Global Company itself, even, would put you to death if your superiors knew all the things you’ve done in this place.”

The gray cat had crouched and was shifting her weight.

“The month before you became a doctor, you put your sister in a place like this, to silence her. It worked. She died last fall and you didn’t even go to her funeral—you suspect there were less than five people there, given how she spent her last twenty years in a place like this, but you wouldn’t know. There is a part of you, a flicker of conscience you must have carried over from long before you became who you are now—a light that comes out three or four times per year, like the sun over the Polar Ocean—that knows it is you who belongs here.”

The doctor’s eyes spread in shock. “How the fuck do you—”

The animal pounced, landing on his chest, shredding his shirt on the way up, and bit into his neck, causing blood to fly. The mallet fell from his hands, and he tried to remove the cat, but his fists proved useless at dislodging an animal quick enough to evade his desperate blows. The tearing of flesh from his neck and face by claws and teeth did not abate until he had fallen to supine, screaming and sobbing, legs kicking uselessly as if he were in a state of seizure.

The bad doctor fainted. The gray cat calmly left the room.

The door was opened by a man Farisa had never seen before, but she felt a presence in him distinct from the callous indifference of the wardens and orderlies, a warmth that clashed with his gray uniform. He confirmed his true loyalties with three words.

“Sophya wy fariza.”

He untied Farisa, led her through a corridor into a small room, put her inside, closed the door, and locked it.

#

She slept in the darkness. She lacked the strength to do much else. She tried to remember what the man—maybe it had been more than one person—had said.

“We’ll do what we can to keep you safe.” “If we treat you too well, it’ll tip off our managers.” “We are sending for someone who will get you out of here.”

Farisa hoped this fortunate arrival would come soon. Exertion alone would have reduced her immunity to madhouse fever, but entry into such a foul mind—necessary as it had been—had given the disease full license to occupy her body. The chills were so severe, she felt as if her bones might crack, but her breath was smothering hot. She could not be sure she would survive the time she would have to wait.

In lucid moments, though, she could take stock of her surroundings. She deduced, by the chatter of the outside world, only faintly audible, that she was still in South Exmore, in a place not far from where she had been arrested, and that it was still early May. There was so little stimulation in this place, she had developed a sense for elevation by her ears, and she knew she was thirty or forty feet higher than the pit she had inhabited for so long.

When she slept, she was free of chills, aches, and fear. She had a recurring dream in which she traversed a beach where massive hermit crabs walked within two-ton shells and spiny caterpillars swam in tidal pools. She had become a child again; there were others—all beautiful, all girls—calling her name.

“Come play with us! Nicole, come play!”

The sound of the waves crashing against the beach was one she had missed forever. The sun was higher in the sky than it ever got. She wanted to swim, she wanted to join them, but she could not; she would in a moment be—and now was—elsewhere, in a tulip labyrinth not the place of one dream but where hundreds converged. She had always and never been here. The sky was cloudless, but the sun had not yet risen. Across a lake, white and purple flowers were spreading on a hill. The air tasted like honey, and this would have been a perfect moment, were it not for the recent event of...

“Erysi, I didn’t mean to—”

A rusty door hinge whined. The line of light doubled in her vision; she lacked the force of will to single it up, though it spread itself into a rectangle as the door continued to open.

The man introduced himself as Dr. Klein. The lines on his face were those of a cautious old man. She would not escape unless she could win his trust.

“Eleven, twenty-nine, seven,” the man said.

A test. A puzzle. In the life before, she had been good at those. “Elev-teen, twenty-uh…” She shook her head. “No?”

“Eleven, twenty-nine, seven.”

Code. Of course, a code. Cryptography. Numbers. Prime numbers. Vehu. The eleventh letter of the Lyrian alphabet: siara. Twenty-ninth: wetto. Seventh? Seven, isn’t that…?

Think, Nicole Beatrixa, or you’ll die here.

Think, Farisa.

Seven, farah; farah, seventh. Farah-aht-rhu-imka-siara-ahma. Farisa, fariza. Fariza, the dance of a flame. Many translations. Fariza, virtue. Eleven, twenty-nine, seven; siara, wetto, farah. Sophya wy fariza, knowledge and virtue. Sophya, six letters; wy, just two…

She was so tired that to speak was to wrestle with air, a substance that had become heavy and abrasive in this place, but she had enough cognizance and will to recognize the necessity of putting three words into this world, though it insisted on fading from her.

“Six, two, six.”